Pub Crawl #71
Pub Crawl summarizes, by hard problems, sets of publications that have been peer reviewed and presented at SoS conferences or referenced in current work. The topics are chosen for their usefulness for current researchers. Select the topic name to view the corresponding list of publications. Submissions and suggestions are welcome.
The Internet of Battlefield Things (IoBT) is distinct from the general Internet of Things due to the nature of the hardened specific networks employed under battlefield conditions. For the Science of Security community, this work is relevant to scalability, resilience, and human factors.
The proliferation and increased capability of “smart phones” has also increased security issues for users. For the Science of Security community, these small computing platforms have the same hard problems to solve as main frames, data centers, or desktops. The research cited here looked at encryption issues specific to Apple’s iOS operating system. For the Science of Security community, this work is relevant to the hard problems of compositionality, human factors, resiliency, and metrics.
The term Internet of Things (IoT) refers to advanced connectivity of the Internet with devices, systems and services that include both machine-to-machine communications (M2M) and a variety of protocols, domains and applications. Since the concept incorporates literally billions of devices, the security implications are huge. For the Science of Security community, this work is relevant to the hard problems of resilience, composability, human behavior, and metrics.
Internet Protocol Version 6 is slowly being adopted as the replacement for version 4. Touted as a more secure protocol with increased address space, portability, and greater privacy, research into this and other related protocols has increased, particularly in the context of smart grid, mobile communications, and cloud computing. For the Science of Security community, it is relevant to resiliency, composability, metrics, and policy-based governance.
Successful key management is critical to the security of any cryptosystem. It is perhaps the most difficult part of cryptography including as it does system policy, user training, organizational and departmental interactions, and coordination between all of these elements and includes dealing with the generation, exchange, storage, use, and replacement of keys, key servers, cryptographic protocols, and user procedures. For researchers, key management is a challenge to create larger scale and faster systems to operate within the cloud and other complex environments, while ensuring validity and not adding weight to the process. For the Science of Security community, it is relevant to scalability, resilience, metrics, and human behavior.
Keystrokes are a basis for behavioral biometrics. The rhythms and patterns of the individual user can become the basis for a unique biological identification. Research into this area of computer security is growing. For the Science of Security, keystroke analysis is relevant to the hard problems of human behavior factors and predictive metrics.
Kerberos supports authentication in distributed systems. Used in intelligent systems, it is an encrypted data structure naming a user and a service the user may access. For the Science of Security community, it is relevant to the broad issues of cryptography and to resilience, human behavior, and metrics.
Lightweight Ciphers 2022 (all)
Lightweight cryptography is a major research direction. The release of SIMON in June 2013 generated significant interest and a number of studies evaluating and comparing it to other cipher algorithms. To the Science of Security community, lightweight ciphers can support resilience and scalability, especially in cyber physical systems constrained with power and “weight” budgets.
Linux Operating System Security 2022 (all)
Operating system security is a component of resiliency, composability, and an area of concern for predictive metrics. This research focused on the Linux operating system.
Random Key Generation 2022 (all)
Random and pseudorandom numbers can be used for the generation, exchange, storage, use, and replacement of keys, key servers, cryptographic protocols, and user procedures. For researchers, random key generation is a challenge to create larger scale and faster systems to operate within the cloud and other complex environments, while ensuring validity and not adding weight to the process. For the Science of Security community, it is relevant to scalability, resilience, metrics, and human behavior.
“Ransomware” is the name given to malicious software that locks a computer until an extorted fee or ransom is paid for the key to unlock it. This ransom is usually paid in bitcoin. For the Science of Security community, there are implications for resiliency, composability, and metrics.
Recommender Systems 2022 (all)
Recommender systems are rating systems filters used to predict a user’s preferences for a particular item. Frequently they are used to identify related objects of interest based on a user’s preference to market similar items. As such they create a problem for cybersecurity and privacy related to the hard problems of human factors, scalability, and resilience.
Reinforced Learning with Human Feedback 2019-2022 (all)
Reinforced Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) is a new research area. Machines scan large volumes of data over the internet, then “learn” by interacting with humans in a feedback loop that helps hone their skill. For the Science of Security community, this area is relevant to human factors, resilience, and scalability.
Relational Database Security 2022 (all)
A majority of enterprises store their most sensitive data in relational databases, including personally identifiable information (PII), financial records, and supply chain information. These databases are also the most frequently hacked. For the Science of Security community, relational database security is important for resilience, composability human behavior, and metrics.
Magnetic remanence is the property that allows an attacker to recreate files that have been overwritten. For the Science of Security community, it is a topic relevant to the hard problems of resilience and compositionality and has major implications for the Internet of Things and other cyber physical systems.
Resilience is one of the five hard problems for the Science of Security.
Radio frequency identification (RFID) has become a ubiquitous identification system used to provide positive identification for items as diverse as cheese and pets. Research into RFID technologies continues and the security of RFID tags is being increasingly questioned. This work is related to the Science of Security issues of resiliency and human behaviors.
Science of Security 2021 (all)
Many more articles and research studies are appearing with “Science of Security” as a keyword. The articles cited here discuss the degree to which security is a science and various issues surrounding its development, ranging from basic approach to essential elements. The articles cited here address the fundamental concepts of the Science of Security.
Scientific Computing Security 2022 (all)
Scientific computing is concerned with constructing mathematical models and quantitative analysis techniques and using computers to analyze and solve scientific problems. As a practical matter, scientific computing is the use of computer simulation and other forms of computation from numerical analysis and theoretical computer science to solve specific problems such as cybersecurity. For the Science of Security community, it relates to predictive metrics, compositionality, and resilience.
Software Defined Network (SDN) architectures have been developed to provide improved routing and networking performance for broadband networks by separating the control plain from the data plain. This separation also provides opportunities and challenges for SDN as a security element in IoT and cyberphysical systems. For the Science of Security community, it is relevant to scalability and resilience.
Agent-based modeling of human social behavior is an increasingly important research area. Efficient, scalable and robust social systems are difficult to engineer, both from the modeling perspective and the implementation perspective. The work cited here addresses these problems. It is relevant to the Science of Security community relative to human factors and scalability.
Software assurance is an essential element in the development of scalable and composable systems. For a complete system to be secure, each subassembly must be secure. For the Science of Security community, software assurance is relevant to the hard problems of resilience and scalability.
Spam detection is a general problem in cybersecurity. For the Science of Security community, it is relevant to the problems of scalability, human behavior, and metrics.
SQL Injection Detection 2022 (all)
SQL injection is used to attack data-driven applications. Malicious SQL statements are inserted into an entry field for execution to dump the database contents to the attacker. One of the most common hacker techniques, SQL injection is used to exploit security vulnerabilities in an application's software. It is mostly used against websites but can be used to attack any type of SQL database. Because of its prevalence and ease of use from the hacker perspective, it is an important area for research and of interest to the Science of Security community relative to human behavior, metrics, resiliency, privacy and policy-based governance.
The Secure Socket Layer (SSL) is designed to ensure the security of electronic transactions and the exchange of sensitive information through cryptographic keys and certificates. Several SSL trust models are proposed in the literature to model trust relationship and trust propagation. The research cited here looks at several of those models, particularly in the area of ad hoc networks. For the Science of Security community, this work is relevant to the hard problems of resiliency, scalability, human behavior, and metrics.
Static code analysis is a standard method of testing software prior to production and marketing. Much of the work done in the Science of Security to look at code suggests that these analyses need to address security issues. Methods and practices cited in the research referenced here relate to human behavior, composability, and resiliency.
Static Code Analysis 2022 (all)
Static code analysis is a standard method of testing software prior to production and marketing. Much of the work done in the Science of Security to look at code suggests that these analyses need to address security issues. Methods and practices cited in the research referenced here relate to human behavior, composability, and resiliency.
Steganography Detection 2022 (all)
Digital steganography detection is one of the primary areas or science of security research. For the Science of Security community, it is relevant to the hard problems are privacy, metrics and composability.
Stochastic Computing Security 2022 (all)
Although stochastic computing was historically considered a failure, it may still remain relevant for solving certain problems, including machine learning and control, stochastic decoding, which applies stochastic computing to the decoding of error correcting codes, and image processing tasks such as edge detection and image thresholding. For the Science of Security community, it is of interest relative to resilience and scalability.
Stylometry is a method of tracking user behavior across platforms and using techniques such as writing style and keystrokes. If holds some promise as a tool for insider threat detection. For the Science of Security community, it is relevant to human behavior issues and predictive metrics.
Articles listed on these pages have been found on publicly available internet pages and are cited with links to those pages. Some of the information included herein has been reprinted with permission from the authors or data repositories. Direct any requests for removal via email of the links or modifications to specific citations. Please include the URL of the specific citation in your correspondence.
Pub Crawl contains bibliographical citations, abstracts if available, links on specific topics, and research problems of interest to the Science of Security community.
How recent are these publications?
These bibliographies include recent scholarly research on topics that have been presented or published within the stated year. Some represent updates from work presented in previous years; others are new topics.
How are topics selected?
The specific topics are selected from materials that have been peer reviewed and presented at SoS conferences or referenced in current work. The topics are also chosen for their usefulness for current researchers.
How can I submit or suggest a publication?
Researchers willing to share their work are welcome to submit a citation, abstract, and URL for consideration and posting, and to identify additional topics of interest to the community. Researchers are also encouraged to share this request with their colleagues and collaborators.
What are the hard problems?
Select a hard problem to retrieve related publications.
- - Scalability and Composability: Develop methods to enable the construction of secure systems with known security properties from components with known security properties, without a requirement to fully re-analyze the constituent components.
- - Policy-Governed Secure Collaboration: Develop methods to express and enforce normative requirements and policies for handling data with differing usage needs and among users in different authority domains.
- - Security Metrics Driven Evaluation, Design, Development, and Deployment: Develop security metrics and models capable of predicting whether or confirming that a given cyber system preserves a given set of security properties (deterministically or probabilistically), in a given context.
- - Resilient Architectures: Develop means to design and analyze system architectures that deliver required service in the face of compromised components.
- - Understanding and Accounting for Human Behavior: Develop models of human behavior (of both users and adversaries) that enable the design, modeling, and analysis of systems with specified security properties.